


crack the shell wide open

by sapphicish



Series: hell or high water [2]
Category: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018)
Genre: Gen, Season/Series 02, Spoilers, also she has a crush on zelda, like it's not at all relevant to the fic but she has a crush on zelda, mary wardwell is NOT okay!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-12
Updated: 2019-04-12
Packaged: 2020-01-12 00:52:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18435644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sapphicish/pseuds/sapphicish
Summary: She doesn't look any different, not the way she feels sometimes, not the way she looks in her dreams. Sometimes she has sharp teeth in her dreams, and sometimes she's wearing slathers of bright polish on every nail, and sometimes her mouth is a red slash, opening wide to devour everything in sight. Sometimes she's a monster.Or: three times Mary Wardwell failed to remember something very important, and one time she didn't.





	crack the shell wide open

**Author's Note:**

> i think about the original mary wardwell so much :( hope she's ok

**i. sabrina**

  


“Miss Wardwell!”

Sabrina's voice stops her in her tracks when she's headed down the hallway to her office. It's bright and warm and enthusiastic and always, always startling, even though she should be used to it by now. It's been a couple of weeks, after all.

She's not sure what she means, when she thinks that. A couple of weeks since what? Since the odd dream, certainly, but nothing else had happened. Everything was normal. Painfully, dully normal, the way it always seemed to be in Greendale even when she knew there had to be more interesting things happening out there. Somewhere, somehow.

It just so happens she's not at the center of those interesting things, and she never has been. That's the way she likes it. It just feels wrong, now, different – but when she tries to think about it her mind hits a wall, a big and towering wall that sends her reeling.

“Sabrina,” she says, smiling and turning and smiling because – well, why shouldn't she? It's a lovely day, and she'd only woken up screaming a little, which was progress of some sort. “Good morning.”

“Good morning,” the girl says cheerfully, and Mary still isn't used to her new hair. She doesn't remember when Sabrina had shown up at school one day with it dyed, but that's teenagers for you – always into interesting new fads that make them look slightly eerie.

She can't fault her for it. In a way, it all works, it all comes together. 

“—you doing?”

Mary blinks. “I'm...ah, I'm sorry—“ She adjusts her glasses, feeling a shiver roll down her spine. It's getting warmer out, lately, but it's still cold. She's still cold. She's always cold, which is strange, especially when she piles extra blankets onto her bed and wears more layers and still feels it piercing her skin, a distant chill pressing at her skin. She thinks she might be catching a flu, which isn't uncommon but is still awful considering the circumstances – like how much work she has to do and how much work she's actually managed to get done, which is very little. “What was that?”

Sabrina looks at her for a long moment, and Mary can never refuse the urge to fidget nervously when people look at her like that (and they've been looking at her like that a _lot,_ lately), so she pats self-consciously at her hair, pulls her coat tighter around herself, catches a loose thread on the inside of her left sleeve and plucks it free.

“How are you doing?” Sabrina says, gentle and quiet like she's handling a timid little mouse. It's rather sweet, Mary supposes, for her students to worry about her – and they seem to be doing so in great amounts, all staring at her whenever she passes, whispering among themselves. Billy Marlin hastily spits out a wad of gum into the palm of his own hand and shoves it in his pocket once when he sees her coming, ducking his head and muttering a hasty apology.

She's developed something of a complex over it all, checking a mirror any chance she gets to make sure everything is in order. It always is. She doesn't look any different, not the way she feels sometimes, not the way she looks in her dreams. Sometimes she has sharp teeth in her dreams, and sometimes she's wearing slathers of bright polish on every nail, and sometimes her mouth is a red slash, opening wide to devour everything in sight. Sometimes she's a monster.

But those are just silly, albeit strangely persistent nightmares. She wakes up and looks into the mirror and everything is perfectly fine, and she owns no lipsticks in that shade and no nail polish at all, and her hair isn't sleek and glossy and taken down from its bun. Everything is just the way it's always been.

She wakes up screaming and wakes up screaming and wakes up screaming anyway, but the distinction is important, surely.

Sometimes she feels empty; sometimes she wakes up pressing a hand to her chest and swears she feels a gaping hole there, something that _gives_ when it shouldn't. But she looks down and there's nothing at all but her own hand, her own side, her own beating heart and warm skin, and Mary thinks – well. _Well._ Maybe she shouldn't have gone and watched Night of the Living Dead after all. She loves horror movies, but they've always had a strong impact on her.

It's part of the reason she liked them so much.

Now, though, when she thinks of things with too many teeth and too much hunger covered in so much blood, all that happens is that she starts to cry, and she never has any idea why.

That isn't a rare phenomenon nowadays. She cries herself to sleep, or wakes up crying; she cries at random during drives to Baxter High, though only a couple of songs set her off so badly that she has to pull over on the side of the road to pull herself together. She tries to get back into cooking for herself once and ends up weeping into the chicken broth.

“Miss Wardwell?”

Mary blinks awake again—or so it feels like, like she's fallen asleep right there standing up in the middle of the hall mid-conversation with Sabrina, and a wave of guilt washes over her in addition to a sudden rush of nausea and dizziness, the former fading much quicker than the latter. “I'm terribly sorry, Sabrina. I didn't...sleep very well last night, I'm afraid it's taking its toll.” She has no idea what they were talking about, but she can't very well say that, because what she _does_ recall is asking about it once already.

Sabrina looks at her in the same way most people do lately. “What do you remember?” It rushes out of the girl in an urgent whisper, like some sort of dirty little secret, and then she's silent, growing twice as pale as the question sinks in for the both of them.

Mary feels her brows furrow in response, her mouth opening and closing. “I'm, ah...I'm afraid I don't know what you're talking about.”

Sabrina's shoulders slump a little. It makes Mary itch, the way she can't decipher if that's disappointment or relief. “Of course you don't. I'm...I'm sorry, Miss Wardwell. I'll stop taking up your time.”

Mary opens her mouth to say that it's no trouble at all, that Sabrina knows she can come to her any time with anything, that it's what Mary is here for—but then Sabrina is turning around and rushing off down the hall, around the corner and out of sight.

Mary stands there for longer than she should, blinking slowly and trying to figure out what had just happened.

In the end, she chalks it up to teenagers being teenagers and goes back to her office.

  


**ii. adam**

  


Mary spends a weekend in late April cleaning up around her cottage—it's been neglected in the months after her promotion, so busy she's been with one thing or another. She's reached the drawers of her vanity – one she only ever uses for the mirror nowadays – when she finds it, a small silver band tucked away at the bottom of a jewelry box she hasn't opened in a while. She'd forgotten she owned one at all, really. Its contents are sparse, a testament to the fact that she doesn't wear jewelry hardly ever. When she inspects it closer she sees it, in swirling script on the underside, an engraving that reads _A & M._ She turns it over in her fingers for a full minute, thinking.

It must be an old family heirloom she's forgotten about. She has plenty of them lying about, though most of them she doesn't truly know or recall the origins of, and this one seems to be no different.

She traces the engraving with the tip of her thumb, again and again and again. It feels familiar, so she must have known it was there at one point.

She must have.

At any rate, it's a nice little find. The longer she stares at it the more her eyes burn, and then tears are dripping down her cheeks again, which is something she takes longer to realize than she'd like. She takes one of her tissues – she's had to keep a few boxes around lately – and dabs at her eyes with a sigh, tossing the ring back into the box and pushing the drawer shut.

Mary doesn't think about it at all anymore, after that.

  


**iii. zelda**

  


Of all the generally unfortunate things to happen to Mary since she had the first nightmare, running—literally—into Zelda Spellman at the grocer's is definitely very high on the list.

All she'd been hoping for, really, was a peaceful morning out. There's a thick chill that's settled over Greendale and she's especially vulnerable to the cold lately, so she's standing in the frozen foods section shivering and wishing she'd brought an extra coat when she walks further down the aisle and right into a woman who's grumbling under her breath about 'Hilda' and 'blasted chickens' and 'hellfire and damnation' when the collision happens.

She doesn't piece it together, the name _Hilda_ connected to the elegant voice, until she looks up and swallows. It's embarrassingly loud.

“Miss Spellman,” she says politely, though not without a dawning and horribly familiar sense of nervousness, “I'm so sorry.”

Zelda Spellman is the sort of woman that always makes her nervous, and they've only met a handful of times – the first being when Sabrina was years younger and had gotten in trouble for hitting another student. Mary had forgotten, then, that a second Spellman sister even existed because she'd never seen her even once – up until she showed up at the school, beautiful and intimidating and _glaring,_ and made Mary stammer her way pathetically through an explanation as to why Sabrina was suspended for a month.

Mary remembers vaguely the first words Zelda had ever spoken to her.

_Why have you decided to punish my niece for something that is decidedly not her fault?_

She had thought it was nice. Had understood it, even, that protectiveness, the way Zelda's arm closed around Sabrina's hunched shoulders even in the same second that she redirected her disapproving glare to Mary's young student for one long, blessed moment.

She'd been glad to see it. Everyone knew that Hilda Spellman was a lovely woman with an endless amount of cheerful affection for her niece, but those who met Zelda had very few things to say about her when she was mentioned. Sometimes they would develop a quick look of horror on their faces if questioned about it, but only sometimes – that was how _rarely_ she departed from the Spellman mortuary and its grounds.

So, yes, Mary had been relieved to watch her interact with her niece, to watch Sabrina lean into the halfhearted embrace.

And then Zelda had insinuated that she was an imbecile incapable of taking care of her own students.

Several times.

Standing here in front of her now, she's almost expecting to be pushed solidly on her rear end and called an idiot with how scathing the look on Zelda's face is when she looks up, her mouth open to say something that will probably make Mary want to cry. And then actually cry.

And then it all stops. Zelda freezes, one hand on the cart and the other dangling a bag full of produce from her fingertips, her eyes growing inexplicably wide as though she's seen a ghost. Mary looks over a shoulder just to check that no one else is around – it's just them, so she confirms uneasily that _she_ is the person Zelda is looking at like that. It's all very eerie, enough to make her stumble back a step or two.

“Miss Spellman? Zelda? Are you quite all right?”

Zelda blinks. “Lil—“ Then her voice cuts off, and she draws herself up sharply, and the odd moment passes. Just like that. “Miss Wardwell. Of course.” She shakes her head a little. “Of course I'm all right.”

Mary smiles slowly, sure that it's as uncertain as she feels. “I'm glad. I didn't mean to interrupt your shopping. I'm afraid I just wasn't looking where I was going.”

Zelda clears her throat. “Fine. It's fine. Yes. How are you?”

Oh, Mary thinks. They're doing _this._ It's a song and dance she's usually happy to perform, usually with unhappy parents that don't want to showcase the fact that they're unhappy so they spend, at minimum, five minutes chatting aimlessly to Mary about how happy they are to see her and how glad they are that their children are doing so well at Baxter High and so on and so forth.

It happens less often lately, but it's happened plenty of times, enough that Mary knows exactly what to say and do until Zelda decides she's done.

“I'm...well, starving, actually. As I'm sure you can tell.” She sheepishly nods to her cart, which is full of breads and cheeses and meats enough to feed an entire family for a week. “Not to mention freezing, but Greendale has never been the ideal summer vacationing spot, has it?”

Zelda smiles a little, oddly, and Mary doesn't expect it to reach her eyes but it _really_ doesn't reach her eyes. “No,” she says distantly, like her mind is elsewhere. “No, it hasn't. Well, I...have to get back to the mortuary.” She takes a whole frozen chicken and flings it into her cart alongside several others, tearing her gaze from Mary's face. “Do have a good morning, Miss Wardwell.”

She doesn't wait for Mary's response, which would have been something like 'why, if you don't mind me asking, do you need seven frozen chickens' if she'd been given time. She just walks off instead, glancing only once over her shoulder at Mary as she goes, stopped only by the cashier who reminds her that she has to pay before she leaves.

Mary watches her do so with quite a bit of grumbling, and then, shaking her head bemusedly, she goes back to her shopping.

The Spellmans have always been strange, but that was a little too much for her.

  


**iv. lilith**

  


Mary dreams like this: in shattered pieces, fragments, points that ache and stab at her when she inevitably wakes feeling like she's lost something horribly precious to her. It feels like a vase breaking and her mind is the vase and her body is the vase and her soul is the vase, but she doesn't think of it overly long before the memories of the dreams leave her, drifting further and further away no matter how hard she tries to hold on until, finally, they're all just _gone._

They feel like pieces of herself, in those moments after she sits up panting, vision blurring with tears. Pieces of herself being taken, plucked away, again and again and again until there's nothing left. Mary thinks sometimes that she'll eventually just be all empty and all cold, with nothing to show for it. That she'll essentially be dead. It's silly, she knows – she has no reason to feel that way, no reason whatsoever. And then that horrible fear leaves her too, and she's left mildly confused, knowing that she's felt those things and knowing that there's a reason why she's feeling them and that's all she knows. That's all she ever knows.

She's taken to sleeping with her lamp turned on just because it makes her feel better, knowing that the darkness from outside can't penetrate the cottage, though she knows it's somewhat childish.

She watches the glow now, fingers laced tight in her sheets, breathing in and out to the way the light flickers. She needs to change the bulb in the morning before she leaves, but for now she watches it come on and off, yellow and warm up until it throws her into a startling pitch black for a second too long, jolting her heart rate high again.

It comes back again; and it dims again, and it stays dim, and it's all black, and Mary releases a sigh that makes her ribs ache. That's it, then. Now she'll have to stay awake, staring into the darkness, afraid of something that isn't there.

“You aren't faring very well, are you?”

Eyes meet hers in the shadows across the bedroom, or at least it feels like they do, like something is there, something that belongs to the voice Mary knows she's probably just hallucinating. Sleeping has gotten harder and harder over the weeks, after all, and there's only so much she can take before she falls victim to the same things as anyone else would in her position, like exhausted delusions.

Still, she feels frozen, her fingers aching from the tension in them when she grips onto the sheets and finds herself unable to let go, to relax her muscles again. “Go away,” she says stiffly, not realizing quite how immature it sounds until it's left her mouth.

The thing doesn't say a word, but she knows it hasn't left – can still _feel_ it, looming. Expectantly. Wanting something.

Mary lets the words be pulled out of her, because there's no way she can stop them and she doesn't want to, not really. “Are you what I always hear in my nightmares?”

They're not all nightmares, she doesn't say. Sometimes they're just dreams. Sometimes she's just walking, and walking, and walking, and there's trees all around, and someone or something is holding her hand but she can't look to the side, so she just keeps walking until she wakes up. Sometimes her dream is that she's sleeping, and there's a raven perched on her bedpost and a black cat curled up at her feet, a big and languid cat with a lot of teeth. Sometimes her dream is that she's standing on the ledge of a red building, and it's all black tar below, but she isn't afraid, not even when she jumps, not even when she's submerged, not even when she wakes up.

Mary remembers all of those now, not the way she'd been struggling to before, but instead very clearly. None of them make any more sense for it, but it's nice to remember something for once, anything at all.

“Yes,” the voice says, “but I was never there. I am now.”

“Why?”

“You keep calling for me. You don't realize it, but I can hear it. Trust me, you've grown to be very annoying. And that's quite the feat to achieve when I'm all the way in Hell overseeing my subjects.”

“...I'm sorry?”

The voice sighs. “Oh, never mind. My point is that you will simply not shut up. If I had known...if I had known about this, about you, about the way we were connected – the way we _are_ connected, even now – I would not have given you back. It isn't good for either of us, is it?”

Mary has no idea what they're talking about now, none at all, but she feels herself shaking her head anyway, feels herself—feeling. _Feeling,_ if not knowing. “No. Not really.”

“I did try, you know. To give you back. Fully. Intact. Like a good mortal. I healed your body, I replaced your memories. I fixed you. Why didn't it work?”

“I...I don't know.”

“Of course _you_ don't. I'm not asking _you._ ”

Mary closes her eyes. She's tired. Very, very tired, and a little dizzy, and she's realizing now that this is another dream. She'll wake up, think about it for a few minutes, forget again, start the day, and it'll all happen over and over and over and over and _over and over—_

“Breathe,” the voice instructs, distant and detached and a little curious, “I think you're having a panic attack. Don't faint on me now. I won't be here when you wake up if you do.”

That fills her with a spark of fear that grows, that makes her eyes snap open and her breathing slow, if only just a little.

“Are you Lilith?” she asks, even though she doesn't know the name or where it comes from. Maybe it's from another one of her dreams. Maybe it's from nothing at all. Maybe she's not in her right mind, and maybe she hasn't been for a long time now.

“I am.” The body that belongs to the voice descends from the darkness, framed just by the moonlight shining in through the windows and even then it's very little, not enough to fully make out, but Mary feels it like a thumping in her chest. The body is hers or not hers but is the one that is her body in her dreams, wrapped in the pleasing fabric of clothes that she's never owned, that cling to hips and breasts she's never cared to look at much less be comforted by the knowledge that _others_ might be looking at them. The hair is hers, and not hers; the teeth –

She doesn't want to think about the teeth, or the nails, or the mouth. Or the skin, the hair, the dress.

The body that is not her but looks like her and is her in all the dreams she's been having holds out a hand, head tilting. She smiles. It's the perfect blend of patient and sympathetic, and Mary knows – somehow – that it doesn't come naturally or often at all, but in this moment it _is_ sincere, it _is_ understanding. “Don't mind this. It's all just an illusion. If I was in your body again, you'd know it."

Mary isn't sure she should find that comforting, but she does.

"Do you want to go for a walk?” the voice says, the mouth moving, the fingers splayed and waiting.

Mary looks at Lilith, breath catching. Feels something rush over her, all the pieces clicking together and apart again. 

“Yes,” she says softly, “yes, please.”

Mary waits to see the smile that creeps across her copy's face, and then takes her hand.

**Author's Note:**

> i like to think lilith truly did do her best to help mary out before she left like making sure nothing could slip through the cracks but she...probably didn't! or she did and just no one will acknowledge that and the trauma that mary has gone through on lilith's behalf and ANYWAYS i love both of them with all my heart


End file.
